Entry In Auctions Research Articles

Signaling through entry in auctions with sequential and costly participation

Signaling through entry in auctions with sequential and costly participation

Auctions with Entry versus Entry in Auctions

We show that charging entry fees can sometimes dominate the benefit of recruiting additional bidders to auctions, even though the fees themselves implicitly reduce competition at the auction stage. We also highlight that admission fees and reserve prices are different instruments in a setting with uncertainty over entry costs, and that optimal mechanisms in such settings may be higher-dimensional than in Myerson (1981). Our results provide a counterpoint to the broad intuition of Bulow and Klemperer (1996) that market thickness often takes precedence over market power in auction design.

Entry and competition in takeover auctions

We estimate the degree of uncertainty faced by potential bidders in takeover auctions and quantify how it affects prices in auctions and negotiations. The high degree of uncertainty revealed by our structural estimation encourages entry in auctions but reduces a target’s bargaining power in negotiations. In the aggregate, auctions and negotiations produce similar prices, even though auctions are preferred in takeover markets with high uncertainty, while the reverse is true for negotiations. Firm characteristics predict pre-entry uncertainty and thus are informative about the relative performance of auctions and negotiations for individual targets.

Informed entry in auctions

We examine entry decisions in first-price and English clock auctions with participation costs. Potential bidders observe their value and report maximum willingness to pay (WTP) to participate. Entry occurs if revealed WTP (weakly) exceeds the randomly drawn participation cost. We find no difference in WTP between auction formats, although males have a higher WTP for first-price auctions. WTP is decreasing in the number of potential bidders, but this reduction is less than predicted and small in magnitude.

Incumbency and entry in license auctions: The Anglo–Dutch auction meets another simple alternative

The existence of ex-ante strong incumbents may constitute a barrier to entry in auctions for goods such as licenses. Favoring the allocation to entrants is a way to induce entry and thus create competition. Designs such as the Anglo–Dutch auction have been proposed with this goal in mind. We first show that the Anglo–Dutch auction does indeed foster entry and increases the revenues of the seller. However, we argue that a more effective way could be to stage the allocation of the good so that each stage reveals information about the participants. We show that a sequence of English auctions, with high reserve prices in early rounds, fulfils this property and is more efficient than any one-stage entry auction. Moreover, it also outperforms the Anglo–Dutch auction in terms of seller's revenues.

Experiments on Auction Valuation and Endogenous Entry

We present results of several experiments that deal with endogenous entry in auctions and auction valuation. One observation that is constant across all of the experiments we report is that laboratory subjects have a difficult time evaluating potential gains from auctions. Even after they are given some experience with particular auctions, the uncertainty inherent in the auctions (the probability of winning as well as the potential gains from winning) makes it difficult for subjects to compare different auction mechanisms. This highlights the need for new experimental procedures to be used for testing theories that involve endogenous auction entry in the laboratory.

Econometrics of first-price auctions with entry and binding reservation prices

This paper considers the structural analysis of first-price auctions with entry and binding reservation prices. The presence of entry decisions and binding reservation prices complicates the structural analysis. Building on the recent theoretical work on entry in auctions, this paper assumes that each potential bidder first decides whether or not to incur an entry cost and become an active bidder using a symmetric mixed strategy. Then each active bidder bids optimally following the increasing Nash–Bayesian equilibrium strategy. Using the observed bids and the number of actual bidders, we propose an MSM estimator to estimate the parameters in the distribution of private values and the distribution of the number of active bidders. Our approach can be used to validate the theoretical auction model, to test whether the reservation prices are binding, and to test the mixed-strategy of entry.

Endogenous entry in auctions with negative externalities

In this paper, we study the auction to allocate an indivisible good when each potential buyer has a private and independent valuation for the item and suffers a negative externality if a competitor acquires it. In that case, the outside option of each buyer is mechanism-dependent, which implies that participation is endogenous. As several works in the literature have shown, the optimal auction entails strong threats to induce full entry and maximal expected revenue. This results from the full commitment assumption, which ensures that threats are credible. We show that absent credible threats, the entry process does not lead to full participation: the equilibrium entails screening of agents in the entry stage and a trade-off between reserve prices and entry fees. Besides, we discuss the conditions under which the impossibility to use threats does not prevent the seller from ensuring a minimal screening and reaching a high expected revenue.